Prehistoric sites, dramatic scenery and sandy beaches earn the island the top spot for visitors, with Shetland coming second
The ancient standing stones and neolithic settlements of Orkney have earned it the title of best Scottish island, according to a survey from Which?
Readers were asked to rate 14 of the biggest of the hundreds of islands in Scotland’s waters, with 10 of them receiving an impressive visitor score of 80% or more.
Continue reading...Christopher Marinello has spent three decades finding missing masterpieces, recovering half a billion dollars’ worth of art. He talks about threats from mobsters, tricky negotiations – and bungling thieves
One summer morning in 2008, Christopher Marinello was waiting on 72nd Street in Manhattan, New York. The traffic was busy, but after a few minutes he saw what he was waiting for: a gold Mercedes with blacked-out windows drew near. As it pulled up to the kerb, a man in the passenger seat held a large bin-liner out of the window. “Here you go,” he said. Marinello took the bag and the car sped off. Inside was a rolled-up painting by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux, Le Rendez-vous d’Ephèse. Its estimated worth was $6m, and at that point it had been missing for 40 years.
Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh. In that time, he says he has recovered art worth more than half a billion dollars. When I call him, he answers, then abruptly hangs up. “I was just on my way to a police station to recover a stolen sculpture,” he explains later, apologising.
Continue reading...Having ‘washed up’ on the island due to travel restrictions, our writer finds joy in hiking the Camí de Cavalls coastal trail and swimming in secluded coves
I’m walking along a sandy path through a forest high above the flashing kingfisher-coloured coast. It smells of hot pine and wild rosemary. The sound of bells deep in the wood stops me in my tracks. Have I finally lost my mind, after months of piloting solo through the pandemic on this small island far from home?
From between the trees step a herd of cows, as if from a child’s picture book, caramel coloured, soft noses, liquid eyes and each with a collar from which a large bell swings. Mystery solved, I pick up my water bottle and keep going.
Continue reading...Diana to be among six women honoured as part of English Heritage’s scheme following public campaign
Diana, Princess of Wales, is to be celebrated with a blue plaque in what would have been her 60th birthday year.
English Heritage on Thursday announced its 2021 plaques for six women, who also include the anti-slavery campaigner Ellen Craft; Caroline Norton, who helped change Britain’s divorce laws; and the fashion designer Jean Muir.
Continue reading...It’s hosted opera greats, suffragette rallies, Hitchcock films, sports events, sci-fi conventions – and, of course, the Proms and countless rock gigs. Artists from Led Zeppelin to Abba recall their moments on the hallowed stage
The Royal Albert Hall is 150 years old today (and the Guardian was there to see it opened by Queen Victoria). With a design based on a Roman amphitheatre, stacked balconies pack the audience close to the action – and at a capacity touching 6,000, the number of visitors entertained at the London venue runs to many millions. But what is it like to play as a performer? We asked artists and sportspeople for their memories of being centre stage at the iconic venue.
Continue reading...Leave campaigners behind project only won charitable status by vowing it would tell balanced story
Leave campaigners have begun raising funds to open a Museum of Brexit after the long-awaited project was granted charitable status.
The trustees are seeking to generate £400,000 to buy a home for the museum – possibly in a pro-Brexit town such as Dudley in the West Midlands – plus another £250,000 to set up the institution and a strategic financial reserve of £350,000.
Continue reading...Exclusive: palace and government refuse to say why exemption from 2017 law was deemed necessary
Police have been barred from searching the Queen’s private estates for stolen or looted artefacts after ministers granted her a personal exemption from a law that protects the world’s cultural property, the Guardian can reveal.
Buckingham Palace and the government are refusing to say why it was deemed necessary in 2017 to give the Queen an exemption that prevents police from searching Balmoral and Sandringham.
Continue reading...Chief executive Jakob Stausholm says he will make heritage protection be ‘felt in the hearts and minds’ of his employees
Rio Tinto chief executive Jakob Stausholm has pledged to make protecting cultural heritage an issue which is “felt in the hearts and minds” of his employees in an effort to avoid another Juukan Gorge-style disaster.
The mining company on Tuesday announced it would publicly report to investors on its progress on improving cultural heritage systems and renewing trust with traditional owners, as it attempts to rebuild its shattered social capital.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Bust in Holy Trinity church was modelled by tomb-maker Nicholas Johnson, research finds
They say you should never meet your heroes, which has been just as well for literature fans who for centuries have been told they would never see an accurate likeness of William Shakespeare.
Until recently, there were only two definitive portraits of the playwright widely regarded to be the greatest writer in the English language and both were thought to have been painted posthumously. Art critics have even argued that the most famous – the Cobbe portrait – was more likely to have been a painting of courtier Sir Thomas Overbury, not the Bard at all.
Continue reading...List of historical cleaning methods includes using milk on flagstones but advises against rubbing potatoes on paintings
Do consider using skimmed milk on a flagstone floor, or fresh white bread on wallpaper, heritage experts confidently advise. But please do not follow the advice of housekeepers who used potatoes to clean oil paintings, or Worcestershire sauce to polish the silver.
As some people prepare for a spring clean, English Heritage has revealed some of its best historical cleaning tips – and the worst.
Continue reading...Prime minister says sculptures taken by Lord Elgin would remain in Britain as they had been legally acquired
Boris Johnson has used his first interview with a European newspaper since becoming the UK’s prime minister to issue a point-blank rejection of the Parthenon marbles being returned to Greece.
Johnson insisted that the sculptures, removed from the monument by Lord Elgin in circumstances that have since spurred one of the world’s most famous cultural rows, would remain in Britain because they had been legally acquired.
Continue reading...Researchers in Murcia find exquisite objects at women’s graves later used as sites for elite warrior burials
A burial site found in Spain – described by archaeologists as one of the most lavish bronze age graves discovered to date in Europe – has sparked speculation that women may have been among the rulers of a highly stratified society that flourished on the Iberian peninsula until 1550BC.
Since 2013, a team of more than a dozen researchers have been investigating the site of La Almoloya in the southern Spanish region of Murcia.
Continue reading...Building and repair ban had turned Dal Lake into graveyard for sinking boats even before coronavirus and Delhi crackdown
Ghulam Nabi Butt may be 90 years old, but he has never forgotten the three days that George Harrison came to stay on his houseboat in October 1966.
It was here, on one of Butt’s first historic Clermont houseboats moored on the northern bank of Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir, that the Beatles lead guitarist met the Indian musician and composer Ravi Shankar and was taught to play the sitar – marking the beginning of an musical collaboration that would last decades.
Continue reading...As Paris prepares to commemorate the 150th anniversary, the communards’ vision of a new form of radical democracy is once again dividing France
A couple of years ago, as railway workers demonstrated in Paris against proposed government reforms, a banner in the crowd offered a blast from France’s revolutionary past: “We don’t care about May ’68,” read its slogan. “We want 1871.”
It was a message that the protesters meant business. These days, the students’ revolt of 1968, and its injunctions to “Be realistic … demand the impossible”, are remembered with fond nostalgia. But in the annals of French revolutionary upheavals, the memory of the Paris Commune of 1871 and its bloody barricades has a darker, edgier status. “Unlike 1789, the Commune was never truly integrated into the national story,” says Mathilde Larrère, a historian specialising in the radical movements of 19th-century France. Wild, anarchic and dominated by the Parisian poor, the Commune was loathed by the liberal bourgeoisie as well as by the conservatives and monarchists of the right. Its savage suppression by the French army, and its own acts of brutal violence, created wounds that never healed. “The Commune of 1871 didn’t become part of a consensual collective memory,” says Larrère. In respectable society, it was viewed as beyond the pale.
Continue reading...Campaigners call for historic sports venue in Madrid to become a world heritage site after its €38m restoration
Beneath a pale-blue late-winter sky, and behind an elegant but unassuming facade, one of Madrid’s great unsung survivors sits waiting, once more, for news of the latest in a long and improbable series of metamorphoses.
Since its inauguration 127 years ago, the Frontón Beti-Jai, built at the height of the Spanish capital’s love affair with the Basque game of pelota, has echoed with the crack of leather-stitched balls, with cheers, screams, the thrill of invention, the gunning of thirsty American engines and, most recently, the chirping of the birds who nested in its almost terminal decay.
Continue reading...Planned update to Burgos Cathedral prompts online petition signed by more than 31,000 people
Plans to mark the 800th anniversary of Burgos’s magnificent gothic cathedral with three enormous new bronze doors have ushered in an unholy row, with Unesco advising against the project and critics attacking the €1.2m portals as an “artistic outrage”.
Cathedral authorities in the northern Spanish city say the new doors, designed by the renowned, award-winning artist Antonio López, are a work of contemporary art that will complement “a monument already rendered in five artistic styles that are the fruit of each stage of its eight centuries”. They also point out that the current wooden doors are old and in a poor state of repair.
Continue reading...While Ethiopia’s ancient sites are valued, urban heritage is an afterthought in a city forced to expand ever upwards
Only rubble remains of the former home of Dejazmatch Asfaw Kebede, a member of Emperor Haile Selassie’s government. Built in the early 1900s, and inspired by Indian as well as Ethiopian architecture, the building was demolished in early January without the knowledge of Addis Ababa’s conservation agency, the Culture and Tourism Bureau.
Demolition and reconstruction are now the most common sights along Addis Ababa’s unrecognisably altered skeleton skyline. The collateral damage is the city’s heritage.
Continue reading...Mwazulu Diyabanza has been fined and jailed for entering museums and forcibly removing ‘pillaged’ African artefacts. He tells our writer why the British Museum is now in his sights
Mwazulu Diyabanza makes no secret of why he is in France. If coronavirus had not closed most of Europe’s museums, the Congolese activist would probably be inside one right now, wresting African objects from their displays to highlight what he sees as the mass pillaging of the continent by European colonialists.
And it’s not just the mighty museums. Diyabanza and his supporters also plan to include smaller galleries, private collections and auction houses in their campaign. “Wherever the riches of our heritage and culture have been stolen,” says the 42-year-old, “we will intervene.” As the leader of a pan-African movement called Yanka Nku (Unity, Dignity and Courage), Diyabanza is on a mission is to recover all works of art and culture taken from Africa to Europe. He calls his method “active diplomacy”.
Continue reading...Archaeologists at British Museum and National Trust report surge in interest in 1939 Anglo-Saxon find
It was when she spotted #SuttonHoo trending on Twitter that Sue Brunning knew this was not going to be just like any other week.
As the curator of the early medieval collection at the British Museum, and the guardian of the spectacular Sutton Hoo treasures, Brunning is well used to fielding interest in what are justly some of the museum’s best loved exhibits.
Continue reading...Excavated Shellac rejects the western canon of pop, rock, jazz, classical and more to champion 78rpm gems from overlooked corners of the world – ‘an alternate universe’, according to the man behind it
Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.
These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped. Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the ones here), in which every tune gets discussed – the first is a South African miner’s protest against police brutality, the last a sultry Cuban dance tune whose singers sound like they might have been hitting the rum while recording. This sonic smorgasbord from across the globe lives up to the provocative title, with music from Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico and elsewhere. Ever wondered what the Crimean Tartar Orchestra might sound like? Well, their raucous, minor key, brass party music is fabulous.
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